Danish and Norwegian alphabet

They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system.

Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings.

Also, the collating order for these three letters is different in Swedish: Å, Ä, Ö.

Less often, any vowel including ⟨å⟩ (where it is however recommended to avoid diacritics) may be accented to indicate stress on the word, as this can disambiguate the meaning of the sentence or ease the reading otherwise.

The diacritic signs are not compulsory,[3] but can be added to clarify the meaning of words (homonyms) that would otherwise be identical.

Loanwords may be spelled with other diacritics, most notably ⟨ü⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨à⟩ and ⟨é⟩,[citation needed] following the conventions of the original language.

The words are allé (avenue), diaré (diarrhea), kafé (cafe), idé (idea), entré (entrance), komité (committee), kupé (compartment), moské (mosque), supé (supper), trofé (trophy) and diskré (discreet).

[5] Similarly, the letter ⟨å⟩ was introduced in Danish in 1948, but the final decision on its place in the alphabet was not made.

In Norway, geographical names tend to follow the current orthography, meaning that the letter ⟨å⟩ will be used.

In Danish, the transition was made in 1980[citation needed]; before that, the ⟨w⟩ was merely considered to be a variation of the letter ⟨v⟩ and words using it were sometimes alphabetized accordingly (e.g., Wandel, Vandstad, Wanscher, Varberg in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 1904).